Forum Moderators: martinibuster
domain.com/widget-url.html?aff=0001
After stripping and storing the affiliate id I use:
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $stripped_url");
to redirect to the actual page. Is this the right way to use affiliate links while maintaining PR from these inbound links?
Will it give you credit for links you didn't build, yes.
I don't know what having 30,000 301's pointing at you may or may do in regards to putting up any flags.
Altough they are permanent redirect, Google might not want to see a website woth so many changing URL's.
Depending on your affiliates, you might have more redirect, than actualy pages in your website, right?
aff.domain.com/widget-url.html?aff=0001
Making sure the aff.domain.com URL is inaccessible for spiders using robots.txt.
Then:
After stripping and storing the affiliate id I use:
header("Location: www.domain.com/ + $stripped_url");
No need for any 301 headers, since G. and other spiders abiding the robots.txt will be indexing these pages anyway, right?
PR is definately not passed on this way though... What are your thoughts?
>I give up waiting for the reply of a helpful hand and went ahead with my first mentioned approach.
Sorry, I only just saw your post!
You are planning on implementing your links in exactly the same way as I implement mine......So, IMHO, do it!
I will add some other points:
1. I do not allow my affiliate sites to be crawled by search engines or any other types of bots I can detect. All bots obeying robots.txt are banned, all bots that don't obey robots.txt are banned via htaccess. (catching those is an on-going game).
There are spam bots that will generate thousands of clicks per day through affiliate sites, if you are being paid by the click the merchant will not appreciate this activity!
2. Respect your merchant partner, don't give them "bad-traffic".
3. Your Affiliate site needs to be "squeaky" clean, don't compromise it in any way. Drive traffic to it via the mechanisms that work, but, keep the links "squeaky clean" on the site the merchants see.
straight backlinks.
Thanks for the reply, but I think you misunderstood. I am the merchant, and I have my system setup like this for other affiliates to use...
@mister charlie
Maybe I am missing something here, but how do you suggest setting the appropriate cookie? If site A links to domain.com/widget-url.html, and so does site B, how do you expect me to define which visitor came from where? The HTTP_REFERER is not accurate enough, so that's not an option. Am I missing something here?
